In Japan, real estate agents are by law required to inform potential renters or buyers of murders or suicides that occurred in properties under consideration, though if someone died there of natural causes no one has to say anything. In any event, if you look at an apartment that seems unusually cheap, it might mean the last tenant threw himself out the window—or worse.
This idea is the premise of Inerasable, a ghost story that director Yoshihiro Nakamura has chosen as his return to J-horror, and since I’m fascinated with anything having to do with Japanese housing it’s an idea that immediately appeals to me, even if I’m not exactly a big fan of J-horror. As it turns out, the latter aspect didn’t have a big effect on my opinion, since the movie didn’t strike me as a particularly impressive exercise in the genre. For that matter, it’s grounding in real estate lore wasn’t that intriguing either. Continue reading
It must be contractually mandated that every movie in which Morgan Freeman appears he has to provide folksy voiceover narration. He does it in this bittersweet domestic drama, though there isn’t a whole lot of need for it. The situation is easy to grasp and hardly requires elaboration. Freeman and Diane Keaton play Alex and Ruth, an elderly couple who have spent their whole married life in a 2-bedroom Brooklyn apartment. Since it’s a walkup and they live on the fifth floor, they decide, at the urging of their realtor niece, Lily (Cynthia Nixon), to sell and move somewhere closer to the ground or, at least, to a building that has an elevator because they won’t be able to handle stairs forever. 
As the Oscar nominations for The Big Short testify, the 2008 economic collapse continues to provide raw meat for heavy-duty dramas, as well as comedies of the blackest sort. 99 Homes gets down to the bone of the matter, since it’s concerned with the housing bubble that started the whole disaster. Set in Orange County, Florida, where rampant building in the late 90s and early 00s created a surplus of mini-mansions and put the notion in every existing homeowner’s head that his property was a bottomless gold mine to borrow against, Ramin Bahrani’s tale isn’t subdued enough to qualify as a cautionary tale. Though the losers who find themselves at the mercy of ruthless real estate agent Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) might provide lessons in reckless American financing, Carver’s unabashed opportunist does not, as some have analyzed, represent the 1%. What he actually represents is that element which sees through the sorrow and the pity of any economic disaster and finds a way of making money out of it. And for what it’s worth, Shannon is the perfect actor to play this land shark. His mush mouth delivery and rough features telegraph the man’s callous disregard for anyone stupid enough to have been caught in the racket the banks perpetrated on the public. He shows up at foreclosed homes with his paid cop pals and throws people out, along with their furniture and whatever shred of dignity they have left, without the slightest twinge of remorse. If anything, he implies they deserve it, not for being deadbeats but for being dumb. 
A winner at Cannes and favored contender for the best foreign language film Oscar this year, Laszlo Nemes’s debut feature is both formally audacious and thematically provocative, so much so on both counts that it’s difficult to absorb all the implications while sitting through the movie. Movies about the death camps start from a position of high tension, and making good on that tension is central to the value of the film. Nemes gears up our anxiety by throwing us directly into the horror. His protagonist, Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig), is a Hungarian Jew assigned to be a Sonderkommando, an inmate who essentially carries out the labor at the Nazi death camps, in this case Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul moves new arrivals into the gas chambers, clears out the bodies afterwards, and separates clothing and other valuables. Perhaps understanding that showing these atrocities would be overwhelming, Nemes chooses to keep his camera close to Saul, so that the horrors mostly occur on the periphery of the frame, but there is still the voices and other sounds—of barked orders, panicked victims, and various mechanical noises, all of which are sufficiently overwhelming in their suggestiveness. After fifteen minutes you want the projectionist to call a time out so you can collect your wits. 
Here’s 
In a word, this was a great year for hip-hop, as evidenced by the worldwide acclaim for To Pimp a Butterfly, a record I listened to a lot, and the only reason it didn’t land on this list was probably because in the last few months so many other albums pushed it out of my consciousness. That doesn’t detract from its value, but it does make it less of a presence in my world, which is what these lists are all about. It’s impossible to be objective about music, though it’s nice if you have the time to be able to try to be objective, but of all the albums on this list only the Future joint didn’t immediately grab me the first time I listened. In contrast, there were a few country albums I liked right off the bat–Alan Jackson, Maddie & Tae, Ashley Monroe, Jason Isbell–but they didn’t sustain themselves for as long as it took to make it to the end of the year, which isn’t to suggest I’ll never listen to them again. I didn’t really like the Kacey Musgraves album much when I first heard it and I still think the themes are too conventional, but her craft eventually got to me, just not enough to make me forget Brian Henneman’s. And, yes, I did splurge for the Dylan opus, but not the 18-CD version. What do you take me for? 
I don’t know if I saw fewer movies this year than last or more, and I don’t feel like counting to find out. For sure, there were a few I wanted to see that I didn’t, like Phoenix, which made quite a few critics’ lists, but as for Hollywood and bigger budget entertainments, I found that if I did miss press screenings I could usually count on them being shown at my local multiplex, which is ten minutes from my house by bicycle. They have late shows for only ¥1,300, and Thursday is “Men’s Day.” Tomorrow, I’ll turn 60, which means…well, no need to get anal about it. It’s been so long since I’ve regularly seen movies in a theater rather than in a screening room that the occasions when I do have become special. What’s weird is that whenever I go to the multiplex, I’m usually the only person in the theater, which makes me wonder how they can possibly stay in business. Of the movies on the following list, only one was watched in a movie theater. I almost included Mad Max: Fury Road, another movie I saw in a theater, but since I never wrote about it I hadn’t really considered why I enjoyed it. In a sense, its appeal was centered on how resistant it was to analysis. I get the stuff about female power and George Miller’s talent for comic violence, but those points seem tangential to the movie’s effect, which is purely visceral. It would be like saying, I loved the movie because I got to see it on a huge screen with kickass sound in a theater I had to myself. It has nothing to do with the movie and everything to do with “the movies.”
Product
About Ray
philipbrasor.com 